I was gifted an Asimov subscription back in the late 90s, and when I went to college stopped reading. I recently had subscribed again and found it not as good as I remembered. As a kid it was definitely hit or miss, but as an adult it's all misses. I can figure out if the magazine has changed, or if I have changed, or both. But, it feels like it has gone downhill. Honestly, the whole genre. Maybe it's hard to write sci fi now what we're actually living it. Or, anyone with talent has gone elsewhere.
I think it's probably you. I've been a subscriber to Asimovs for 5+ years and every issue has at least one or two stories that make me say "wow." But I figure at some point I will have read enough stories that I'll run out of "wow"s. Maybe you're there already.
No idea if Asimov’s got worse, but what we’re living right now is so much stupider than any science fiction. AI, but it’s not actually intelligent and it often produces garbage. A fascist takeover of the US from the inside by the dumbest billionaires imaginable, because an entire segment of society got bored with their lives during pandemic lockdown and decided they’d rather live in an action movie than consensus reality.
Nearly infinite computing power on a glass rectangle in your pocket, and it’s only made humanity stupider, again thanks to billionaires who are too stupid to understand where their money and power derives from. And how it can be taken away.
We're living in a time when chickens are coming home to roost. A nation can't sustain greatness by borrowing forever. SF could have helped people come to grips with this inevitability, but I guess it didn't.
